“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” - George W. Bush

Thursday, July 29, 2010

The Amnesty End-Run by Obama

There is nothing more important to individual rights than laws that protect individual property and freedom and define what it means to be an American citizen. Those rights are protected by our constitutional rights, or used to be.

Unfortunately we have an internationalist president that places little value on what is best for America and is intent on assaulting what to most Americans are our traditions. His very shallow American roots are showing in almost everything he does, but no more so than what he is trying to pull with illegal immigrants.

That is obvious with the suit against Arizona, but more so in this internal memo from the US Immigration Service.

Can it be that the federal establishment under Obama is becoming a greater threat to individual American liberties and freedom than Al Qaeda. Ridiculous? Preposterous? Read on...

____________________________

The Amnesty MemoJuly 29, 2010 5:30 PMBy Robert VerBruggen

According to an internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services memo going the rounds of Capitol Hill and obtained by National Review, the agency is considering ways in which it could enact “meaningful immigration reform absent legislative action” — that is, without the consent of the American people through a vote in Congress.

“This memorandum offers administrative relief options to . . . reduce the threat of removal for certain individuals present in the United States without authorization,” it reads.

Also: “In the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations, exercising discretion with regard to parole-in-place, deferred action and the issuance of Notices to Appear (NTA), and adopting significant process improvements.”

In recent weeks, Sen. Chuck Grassley and others in Congress have been pressing the administration to disavow rumors that a de facto amnesty is in the works, including in a letter to Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano. “Since the senators first wrote to the president more than a month ago, we have not been reassured that the plans are just rumors, and we have every reason to believe that the memo is legitimate,” a Grassley spokesman tells NR. (NR contacted DHS, but a spokesman did not have a comment on the record.)

Many of the memo’s proposals are technical and fine-grained; for example, it suggests clarifying the immigration laws for “unaccompanied minors, and for victims of human trafficking, domestic violence, and other criminal activities.” It also proposes extending the “grace period” H-1B visa holders have between the expiration of their visa and the date they’re expected to leave the country.

With other ideas, however, USCIS is aiming big. Perhaps the most egregious suggestion is to “Increase the Use of Deferred Action.” “Deferred action,” as the memo defines it, “is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion not to pursue removal from the U.S. of a particular individual for a specific period of time.” For example, after Hurricane Katrina, the government decided not to remove illegal immigrants who’d been affected by the disaster.

The memo claims that there are no limits to USCIS’s ability to use deferred action, but warns that using this power indiscriminately would be “controversial, not to mention expensive.” The memo suggests using deferred action to exempt “particular groups” from removal — such as the illegal-immigrant high-school graduates who would fall under the DREAM Act (a measure that has been shot down repeatedly in Congress). The memo claims that the DREAM Act would cover “an estimated 50,000” individuals, though as many as 65,000 illegal immigrants graduate high school every year in the U.S.

In the immediate wake of the court decision blocking the Arizona immigration law yesterday, the memo is sure to create controversy — and the sense that the administration is bent on preserving and extending the nation’s de facto amnesty.

UPDATE: USCIS has released a statement on the memo:

Internal draft memos do not and should not be equated with official action or policy of the Department. We will not comment on notional, pre-decisional memos. As a matter of good government, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will discuss just about every issue that comes within the purview of the immigration system. We continue to maintain that comprehensive bipartisan legislation, coupled with smart, effective enforcement, is the only solution to our nation’s immigration challenges.

Internal memoranda help us do the thinking that leads to important changes; some of them are adopted and others are rejected. Our goal is to implement policies wisely and well to strengthen all aspects of our mission. The choices we have made so far have strengthened both the enforcement and services sides of USCIS — nobody should mistake deliberation and exchange of ideas for final decisions. To be clear, DHS will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.

The current U.S. financial sector has been selected to reap enormous profits off a very narrow ecology of speculation, credit, risk and leverage. That parasitic specialization makes it highly vulnerable to extinction.

In nature, species which go extinct often do so when they have become increasingly specialized to exploit a narrow source of sustenance.

The U.S. financial system has already exploited the standard ecologies of capital and lending. How profitable is originating and holding plain-vanilla mortgages? Not very...

...the U.S. financial system, dominated by highly profitable money-center and investment banks, is akin to a species which has adapted to exploit a very specific ecology of finance: a world in which leverage is unlimited, and assets, liabilities and risks can be gamed and cloaked in a "shadow banking system" free from competition and interference.

Were this ecology to collapse, so too would the financial system which had become dangerously dependent on this source of profits.

It seems that is one way to describe precisely what happened in 2007-2008 when the system's source of profits--the highly specialized ecology of ever-rising credit, leverage and derivatives--collapsed.

The financial sector is now so specialized and so dependent on dwindling sources of profit that even State manipulation cannot broaden its withering supply of financial fodder.

The financial system cannot go back to the slow-growth, unleveraged transparent financial environment and retain its vast profits. So as it clings to the dwindling ecology of leverage, risk and shadow banking, the system is selecting itself for extinction.

Given its parasitic, predatory nature and the little value it adds to the real economy, that extinction of the shadow banking system would be a highly positive prospect for everyone but the parasites themselves, who can always choose to become lower-paid bankers doing traditional, transparent low-profit banking.

The ironic prospect of progressive bankers and politicos of the Ruling Class being undone by Darwinian forces is quite rich.

And yet another good find on whether Journolist participants might have opened themselves to a civil RICO claim - Joint Media Special Operations @ finenrespice

Fairly thorough analysis for an "amateur".

That would be the ultimate Darwinian irony - trial lawyers taking down the Ruling Class's mouthpiece(s). After all, aren't most trial lawyers essentially mercenaries who work for the highest bidder regardless of ideology? There may even be multiple layers of irony..

Lastly, before going to bed, I must note that I found myself in violent agreement with Ash for the first time ever today when reading this comment: I think an interesting question in all this is 'why was most of that stuff designated secret?'.

Certainly the identities of Afghan soldiers should not have been disclosed as their lives may now be at risk. But, the vast majority of that info should never have been classified.

The President and his Team were, according to j willie and whit, right on the money with their response to the Deep Water Horizon episode. The administration's reaction to the spew, both timely and lawful.

The after action reports clearly indicating that the oil was not a pervasive as first thought, by the President's critics.

That is, of course, if those underwater plumes were really products of NOAA's imagination.

But, be that as it may, j willie is now posting what would have to be described as a Marxist text on the US banking system. Describing it as parasitic to our society. Which it well may be, but if so, is an indictment of the US style of Capitalism which we are defending around the whirled, with our 700 plus military installations.

That the US is soon to feel the bite of economic evolution. Our chosen path of centralization of power, political, military and economic dooming US to extinction.

Darwin and Marx, they knew the real deal, according to j willie's latest posting.

With regards to today's topic, the chickens are coming home, to roost.

The Government is going to come to terms with those 20 million folks that reside in the US, without documentation.

The Congress refuses to adequately address the issue, that much is clear. The Executive branch, the enforcer of the Rule of Law, has for the past decade, more really, has refused to enforce a variety of laws that address the issue of illegal immigration and off the books employees.

As was the case with "Farmers Markets", here in AZ, a Federal audit found that 1/3 of the employees, almost 350 folk out of 1,000 had false documentation.

Forged papers.

It took a Federal audit to weed out these illegals from the legally authorized workers. The tools that the Federals have made available to the employers, were used to verify those 350 illegals status, as legal and Federally authorized workers. Making it impossible for the employer to police his own workforce, within the current legal system.

So, unless we want the Federals to audit every employer, and every one that pays a 'contractor' over $600 per annum, to ensure that those paid were legally in the country, we have to "do something" else.

But while the Congress is stagnant on the subject, the permanent Government will slowly move to regularize those 20 million folk, one way or another.

20,000,000 who have relatives and friends, all who will want to get in on the action. What is the action?

Stage one is to get a better paying job than they could get in their own lands. That comes at a cost to US citizens in the form of higher social costs. That is bad enough.

Phase two, after legalization, is the real problem. The newly legalized, will be voracious consumer of federal freebies: social security, public healthcare, education, childcare subsidies and a cornucopia of government services unavailable to them in their native lands.

Our rulers and masters will adore the newly thronged swell of voters and will cater to their wishes and bias.

It is a zero sum game and the legislated losers will be the American chumps that tried to do the right thing and made the fatal error of trusting the system.

"“You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

“You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish."

“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires-so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifice nor accept them.

“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit-his love, his friendship, his esteem-except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread-a man of justice.

"“You who are worshippers of the zero-you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing-and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.’ I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

"“This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth-in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.

“If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: ‘What is the good?’-the only answer you will find is ‘The good of others.’ The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’ is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others-all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the ‘non-good for me.’

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this word to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

“But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

“You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle-and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:

“I swear-by my life and my love of it-that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

The rhetorical circumlocutions that the Bar rat goes thru to rationalize his irrational positions would best be described as "pretzel logic".

On top of that, to posit that the Obama administration was right in its judgment regarding the oil spill is exactly like saying a broken clock is right twice a day. They still don't know WTF is going on and are mostly just relieved its out of the news. To deny their gross incompetence in all respects of responding to the oil spill, which even the liberals admit, it just plain stupid.

Regarding the illegals, Rasmussen now reports that support for a fence has climbed to 68%, up 9% since Arizona passed SB1070, that support for an SB1070 equivalent in their home state has climbed to 61%, 56% oppose Obama challenge to SB1070 and 54% want federal action to challenge sanctuary cities.

As Dick Morris notes, there is no way, no how this issue is a winner for Obama. It breeds anger, frustration, dissatisfaction and basically just swells the ranks of the tea parties. If Obama attempts to end run Congress with large scale amnesty, I believe the blowback against Obama and illegals would be widespread, vicious and immediate.

“The work of science is like building a pier out into the ocean. We excitedly add on to the pier little by little, but then we look around and say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m at the end of the pier, but there’s a lot more out there.’ The ocean of what we don’t know always dwarfs what we do know, he says. ‘During our lifetimes, we will get further on that pier. We’ll understand more at the end of our lives than we do now, but it ain’t going to cover the ocean.’”

“He just wants to keep an open mind, which is what he thinks science is all about—extend the pier but don’t forget about the vastness of the ocean, expand what we know but remember that what we know is dwarfed by what we don’t know…”

“’…I have felt as I’ve gotten older that I am not the same as my body, despite all of the neuroscience…I would say ‘you know, I kind of feel like there’s something about me that’s a little separate from the biology.’ But I have no evidence for that.’”

Watching CNBC this morning, I saw another superficial discussion on taxes and the benefits or lack thereof of extending the bush tax cuts. As usual, the discussion centered on marginal income tax rates and ignored discussion of effective rates, or for that matter, withholding taxes.

Also as usual, the proponents of extending the Bush tax cuts revisit the meme that if the top tax rate goes to 39% the US will have the second or third highest tax rates among the industrialized nations. This ignores the fact that the average “effective rate” in the US is just north of 16%, that in recent years 25% of our major corporations paid no taxes, that companies like Goldman Sachs can earn billions and still pay an effective rate around 1%, and that most of the countries we compete with have VAT taxes.

This is not plea for higher taxes but merely pointing out the speciousness of the GOP argument. In fact, if the tax cuts are extended we can be assured that the increase in spending and deficits will continue. We are living beyond our means and at some point we will need both tax increases and spending cuts to reverse the trend. However, the argument we get from both sides on the taxes versus spending argument is “you go first”, which amounts to a formula for no action at all.

Yes Rufus, it is important because it makes sense. The TBTF banks (meaning the mega-investment banks now disguising themselves as commercial banks) have in fact specialized themselves into voracious locust-like creatures that feed only on leverage, credit and speculative assumption of risk with OPM. Problem is they have run out of OPM and their leverage is already infinite because they have no equity. They are merely facades propped up by US Treasury, Fed Reserve and China's need to recycle dollars. Having basically eaten their legs out from under themselves, they must eventually fall. No way around it.

Nassim Taleb offers a related perspective. When asked where he thinks the biggest potential source of systemic fragility is, he responds: "The massive one is government deficits. As an analogy: You often have planes landing two hours late. In some cases, when you have volcanos, you can land two or three weeks late. How often have you landed two hours early? Never. It's the same with deficits. The errors tend to go one way rather than the other. When I wrote The Black Swan, I realized there was a huge bias in the way people estimate deficits and make forecasts. Typically things costs more, which is chronic. Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it. The problem is getting runaway. It's becoming a pure Ponzi scheme. It's very nonlinear: You need more and more debt just to stay where you are. And what broke Madoff is going to break governments. They need to find new suckers all the time. And unfortunately the world has run out of suckers."

You have reminded me of a medical truism: When you hear the sound of hoof-beats, don't expect to see Zebras.

Max Weber, the founding father of modern bureaucracy warned that the ultimate purpose of any bureau would be perpetuation. In deed, the bureau would "forget" its first cause, generally finding that cause a hindrance.

“The Executive branch, the enforcer of the Rule of Law, has for the past decade, more really, has refused to enforce a variety of laws that address the issue of illegal immigration and off the books employees.”

Once again the Tea Party is correct in calling for a reduction in the size of government. Under our current form of government the actual laws passed by Congress are basically insignificant except as vehicles granting unnamed and unelected bureaucrats and staff the power to write the rules and determine which of those rules they will choose to enforce and which to ignore. And as the government’s role becomes more expansive and complex the opportunity for the corruption and the erosion of rights grows. Hell, the U.S. government has proven they can’t even run the national cemetery, how are they supposed to run a national health plan?

Government work is the only growth industry in this country with the possible exception of healthcare. The growth in government jobs over the past ten years under both parties has been unprecedented. We now have 16 investigative agencies under Top Secret America, and probably a number of others we don’t know about as Rufus pointed out in a recent post. If there is a failure at any one of these organizations, the current modus operendi is to form an investigative commission which will inevitably decry the lack of oversight and integration, recommend additional resources be allocated, and suggest an additional level of bureaucracy to solve the problem.

The new FinReg regulations call for 20 additional regional panels be formed just to monitor diversity goals.

We are moving towards the Greek Model, where a third of the population works for the government, and those in the streets protesting government austerity programs are mostly government workers.

And how is this growth justified? There are a million excuses. The latest being stimulus. Or as an Obama administration official put it to justify the overlap in the work of our 16 security agencies, the redundancy is necessary to assure our security.

The amount of crude held on very large crude carriers hired for long-term storage has fallen 73 percent this year to 11 million barrels as of July 29, according ICAP Shipping International Ltd. The Otina, a tanker with a capacity of about 2.4 million barrels chartered by Royal Dutch Shell Plc, unloaded in the Gulf this week, said Simon Newman, a senior tanker analyst with ICAP in London.

I stated back in Jan that we were going through "floating storage" at about 1 million barrels/day. (You'll notice the Bloomberg article didn't mention all the smaller tankers. They are, of course, shedding inventory as well - perhaps, faster, in that they are, likely, smaller money.)

We're getting to the end of the "floating storage," now. The Chicago PMI was 62, and change, today, and "gasoline supplied" was up to 9.4 million barrels/day last week.

I expect the "rubber" to start making contact with "de road" sometime in the next few weeks.

I continue to maintain that small government conservatism - hell, even smaller government conservatism - is mere rhetorical device. Political chum. One does not run the world's Goliath with a petite government infrastructure.

"I continue to maintain that small government conservatism - hell, even smaller government conservatism - is mere rhetorical device. Political chum. One does not run the world's Goliath with a petite government infrastructure.

It should come to the surprise of no one that the price of empire is the diminution of freedom.

Federalism was meant to control government. It is failing. The breakdown of federalism is reaching a point of nullifying any states rights. The courts are not helping.

The federal government has blown $1 trillion in ten years of nation building and the blow-back is that the only nation that matters, the US, has been seriously degraded.

That is not rhetoric, but does point to the disadvantage faced by most conservatives. Most true conservatives do not believe in bureaucracy. They believe in being left alone. The Left, the enemies of freedom, love agendas, manifestos, doctrine , all the shit that glazes over your eyes and numbs your mind.

A conservatives looks on in bewilderment thinking that the left "cannot possibly believe in such bullshit can they?" Well, they do and if history repeats itself, as it usually does, the liberals and lefties will FTU beyond all possible belief. Some fascists ( not to be confused with conservatives as the non-thinkers often misconstrue) will step in, and a lot of killing will sort things out again.

To add to your being fair point, I started the name calling (economic knucklehead and troll), although not with an Alinsky motivation, but just an old fashioned whim to see if it would get his goat. Obviously it did, because immediately thereafter he resorted to the j wahhabi moniker.

Like the lady speaking to the Atlanta tea party said, I don't care what you call me b/c I know what (and who) I answer to. And it damn sure aint da rat.

It's a hard, hard row to hoe but, godammit, millions have to do it every miserable work day to keep the rest of you from injuring yourselves.

You know how there are these regular surveys regarding the level of trust in various government institutions?

There was a hilarious piece in The Onion recently titled something like, "Poll Reveals Government Trust In Citizens At All Time Low."

Laughed my ass off.

Some obscure government functions are even, from my POV, ideally located, Rufus. Take Sugar Hill, WV, for instance. Sounds lovely and I'd much rather be there. Or even down in Charlottesville, where they've opened a sprawling analysis branch, I think it is, of the Ministry of Truth.

I like that analogy about the expanding but very limited boundaries of human knowledge as a pier. A business school ethics class professor used a similar analogy to "open my mind" to that concept in a private conversation in his office. This one, however, is certainly more artful.

Regarding bureaucracy as the Ruling Class' bulwark against systemic breakdown, the same blogger who wrote about finance and natural selection made a similar point in another post, but then conflated it with marketing a book he wrote. Hate when people do that. Nevertheless, his book makes valid points about the number and amplitude of long term cycles that will likely bring the bureaucracy to his knees, if conservatives do not do so first. Included are peak oil (he's a major proponent, I'm not); the others I agree are overdue and could combine to create a tsunami - Kondratieff wave (credit booms/busts), the Fischer wave (wage stagnationn/inflation cycle), an 80 year (4 generation) transformative cycle operative in American history (1781, 1861, 1941...2021). He also throws in the Elliot Wave Supercycle and a war cycle. Interesting food for thought.

"WASHINGTON – She's not a political animal, Michelle Obama is the first to admit.

Yet with an e-mail here and a kind word there, the first lady has dipped her toes into the political waters of the midterm elections.And Democratic candidates are hoping there's lots more to come this fall.

With her sky-high popularity — Mrs. Obama's favorability numbers easily outdistance her husband's — plenty of Democrats would love a sprinkle of the first lady's stardust.

Finally, DR, you say the Obama admin demonstrated its competence in the wake of the oil spill by not overreacting, however, a new report finds that the government itself may very well have created the disaster by failing to follow its own (Coast Guard) policies in fighting the initial fire on the platform.

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.

An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Capt. Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list.

The main source of the spill was not the blowout preventer, but the riser pipe to the rig. When the rig collapsed and sank a few days after the blowout, the pipe tore open and began pouring tens of thousands of barrels of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico. Had the rig been salvaged, it’s likely that most of the spill would never have occurred.

These new details raise serious questions for the White House, which has repeatedly pinned the blame on BP. If it turns out the Coast Guard is at fault — either because it didn’t follow proper procedures or couldn’t respond adequately because of a lack of resources — the public has a right to know why we’re just now learning this information 100 days after the disaster began.

The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama’s spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Coast Guard updated its official maritime rescue manual — advising against firefighting aboard a rig — just seven months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That change in policy came at a time when Adm. Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a “hollow force.”

An earlier report from Mehta and Solomon also raised important questions that the White House has yet to answer about what Obama knew when. That investigation revealed the White House timeline of events failed to acknowledge an oil leak until four days after the explosion, even though the Coast Guard’s timeline reported a leak one day after the explosion.

That also has a relation to the administration’s insistence on imposing a moratorium on all new drilling in the Gulf. If the issue was that previous inspections by the MMS couldn’t be trusted, it wouldn’t take a blanket moratorium to fix it. MMS could reinspect each rig and allow new drilling to proceed on a case-by-case basis. But if the Coast Guard has inadequate resources to address rig fires thanks to ill-conceived budget cuts, then their fear of expanded drilling makes a little more sense.

Finally, DR, you say the Obama admin demonstrated its competence in the wake of the oil spill by not overreacting, however, a new report finds that the government itself may very well have created the disaster by failing to follow its own (Coast Guard) policies in fighting the initial fire on the platform.

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.

An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Capt. Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list.

The main source of the spill was not the blowout preventer, but the riser pipe to the rig. When the rig collapsed and sank a few days after the blowout, the pipe tore open and began pouring tens of thousands of barrels of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico. Had the rig been salvaged, it’s likely that most of the spill would never have occurred.

These new details raise serious questions for the White House, which has repeatedly pinned the blame on BP. If it turns out the Coast Guard is at fault — either because it didn’t follow proper procedures or couldn’t respond adequately because of a lack of resources — the public has a right to know why we’re just now learning this information 100 days after the disaster began.

The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama’s spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Coast Guard updated its official maritime rescue manual — advising against firefighting aboard a rig — just seven months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That change in policy came at a time when Adm. Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a “hollow force.”

That also has a relation to the administration’s insistence on imposing a moratorium on all new drilling in the Gulf. If the issue was that previous inspections by the MMS couldn’t be trusted, it wouldn’t take a blanket moratorium to fix it. MMS could reinspect each rig and allow new drilling to proceed on a case-by-case basis. But if the Coast Guard has inadequate resources to address rig fires thanks to ill-conceived budget cuts, then their fear of expanded drilling makes a little more sense.

Finally, DR, you say the Obama admin demonstrated its competence in the wake of the oil spill by not overreacting, however, a new report finds that the government itself may very well have created the disaster by failing to follow its own (Coast Guard) policies in fighting the initial fire on the platform.

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.

An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Capt. Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list.

The main source of the spill was not the blowout preventer, but the riser pipe to the rig. When the rig collapsed and sank a few days after the blowout, the pipe tore open and began pouring tens of thousands of barrels of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico. Had the rig been salvaged, it’s likely that most of the spill would never have occurred.

These new details raise serious questions for the White House, which has repeatedly pinned the blame on BP. If it turns out the Coast Guard is at fault — either because it didn’t follow proper procedures or couldn’t respond adequately because of a lack of resources — the public has a right to know why we’re just now learning this information 100 days after the disaster began.

The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama’s spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Coast Guard updated its official maritime rescue manual — advising against firefighting aboard a rig — just seven months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That change in policy came at a time when Adm. Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a “hollow force.”

That also has a relation to the administration’s insistence on imposing a moratorium on all new drilling in the Gulf. If the issue was that previous inspections by the MMS couldn’t be trusted, it wouldn’t take a blanket moratorium to fix it. MMS could reinspect each rig and allow new drilling to proceed on a case-by-case basis. But if the Coast Guard has inadequate resources to address rig fires thanks to ill-conceived budget cuts, then their fear of expanded drilling makes a little more sense.

Finally, DR, you say the Obama admin demonstrated its competence in the wake of the oil spill by not overreacting, however, a new report finds that the government itself may very well have created the disaster by failing to follow its own (Coast Guard) policies in fighting the initial fire on the platform.

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.

An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Capt. Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list.

The main source of the spill was not the blowout preventer, but the riser pipe to the rig. When the rig collapsed and sank a few days after the blowout, the pipe tore open and began pouring tens of thousands of barrels of oil each day. Had the rig been salvaged, it’s likely that most of the spill would never have occurred.

These new details raise serious questions for the White House, which has repeatedly pinned the blame on BP. If it turns out the Coast Guard is at fault — either because it didn’t follow proper procedures or couldn’t respond adequately because of a lack of resources — the public has a right to know why we’re just now learning this information 100 days after the disaster began.

The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama’s spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Coast Guard updated its official maritime rescue manual — advising against firefighting aboard a rig — just seven months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That change in policy came at a time when Adm. Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a “hollow force.”

That also has a relation to the administration’s insistence on imposing a moratorium on all new drilling in the Gulf. If the issue was that previous inspections by the MMS couldn’t be trusted, it wouldn’t take a blanket moratorium to fix it. MMS could reinspect each rig and allow new drilling to proceed on a case-by-case basis. But if the Coast Guard has inadequate resources to address rig fires thanks to ill-conceived budget cuts, then their fear of expanded drilling makes a little more sense.

Sorry for the repetition. Every attempt to poste generated a "RI too large" error msg, so I kept trying to whittle it down, not knowing that Blogger had already accepted it. Blogger is a pos.

And there goes DR, misdirecting and distorting again. Last time I checked, Allen worked for Obama. Obama left an incompetent man in the position, as he also did at MMS. It is the Obama administration at fault, if the findings are correct, which I bet will be the case.

It's also the Obama admin that cut the Coast Guard budget while piling on trillions in BS stimulus spending. Perhaps cutting the Coast Guard budget was part of a larger strategy to end offshore drilling.

Funny, the Generals failed in Vietnam, then failed in Iraq and are now failing in Afghanistan, but are still admired by the average guy on the street.

That is exactly why Israel should pay no attention to any direction given by those jockeys. They have not ridden a horse across the finish line since 1945.

Further, I would argue that this performance is the direct result of MAD. If you cannot fight a war, there is no way to prove the proofs of a training manual. Two generations of officers have grown up being fed garbage. Good grief, even ole Wes Clark tried his hand as a modern von Clausewitz. We have finally reached the point where PFCs and civilian paper shufflers are experts. I'm with Groucho: When your barber starts giving you stock tips, it's time to get out.

I lifted this comment, word for word, from a commentor at the OD. I thought it made a lot of sense.

Re: Fossil Fuel Subsidies Are 12 Times Support for Renewables, Study Shows, up top.

Sometimes I despair of commenting because it doesn't change any one's ideas. I do it anyway just for my personal enjoyment in pointing out the obvious, at least obvious to me.

From the article:

The U.S. in 2009 provided the most clean energy subsidies, at $18.2 billion, according to New Energy Finance. China provided about $2 billion of support, a “deceptive” figure because the country’s state-owned banks also provide “much crucial support” through low-interest loans, the group said.

With the capping of BP's gulf well TOD has recently returned to bashing ethanol again in a couple of posts. One of the posts claimed that the blenders credit is redundant and a waste of about $6 billion a year.

I am always amazed at the frugality of ethanol opponents. They see $6 billion a year as a boondoggle and go on and on about it. But we spend about $7 billion a month in Afghanistan for who knows what with few boondoggle complaints from anyone. That's about $84 billion a year. Not a peep of outrage.

And the GAO recently reported that the Pentagon has lost track of over $2 billion in Iraq. No outrage again.

Oil has subsidies much greater that the $18.2 cited in the article. They include the costs of wars for oil security that have been raging for the last 20 years. And the costs of lives lost, both American and non American. They include the cost of caring for the war injured and the lost productivity when returning soldiers can not work because of those injuries.

They include the costs of broken families who now have to struggle without support from a bread winner killed or injured in wars for oil security.

They include the costs and potential costs of events like BP's spill as limits are pushed to find oil in hard to reach places like a mile under water.

Oil has a lot of hidden subsidies and costs.

But renewables like ethanol are attacked because the subsidies are easy to see and label. When it comes to subsidies it seems like out of sight is out of mind.

Imported oil does not have a high EROEI. That was collected by the oil company that produced it. Imported oil has the high costs (subsidies) of wars for oil security associated with it plus the oil once imported is nothing but a negative energy operation.

It is comsumed. And the money to import more has to be earned by the economy or borrowed with actual payment postponed. It may look like no subsidies are being paid for imported oil but it has in fact subsidies very much higher than ethanol and its EROEI has to be much less than ethanol since there is no energy gain with imported oil.

We now import about 60 percent of American oil. This is a massive energy drain on the economy since foreigners collected the energy gain when they sold us the oil.

We collect the economic can if any when we consume the oil. If there is enough of it we can buy more oil.

We collect both the energy gain and the economic gain with domestic oil and ethanol production. But imported oil is a massive economic drain on the economy with no energy gain. The same is true with emported ethanol.

Even ethanol opponents agree that there is financial gain in ethanol production. The problem seems to be that they don't see themselves getting any of it and resent those who are getting it. That is the reason behind of boondoggle cries.

Funny thing is if the money goes to foreign wars in support of oil access, it is not a boondoggle.

Yet what do we see? Attacks on renewable energy subsidies which in the grand scheme of things are relatively small. We see fallacious reasoning where renewable energy is compared with nonrenewable using EROEI.

We see all energy being treated as the same. We see domestically produced oil, imported oil and ethanol being compared without regard to the true costs of each, both energy wise and money wise.

I'm not a doomer. But I can see the logic of becoming one with the way even the Peak Oil aware can not sort out the subsidies going to each form of energy and costs/benefits associated with the use of renewables vs non renewables.

You have to be very careful how you phrase things around DR and others, as evidenced by DR's brilliant counting of the number of times you mentioned "Allen". As you will discover, some of the regulars can find a conspiracy in a box of Cracker Jacks. Throw in Israel somehow and it becomes the stuff of web-legend and horrorscope.

Did you know that from the founding of medical schools in Europe in the 13C, a physician had to be an astrologer? Yep...and often a barber as well.

Did you know that most first rate universities required fluency in Hebrew for graduate work, until the late 19thC?

In the end, making the bailout work — whatever the cost — is the only good reason for buying a Volt. The car is not just an environmental hair shirt (a charge leveled at the Prius early in its existence), it is an act of political self-denial as well.

If G.M. were honest, it would market the car as a personal donation for, and vote of confidence in, the auto bailout. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of cross-branding that will make the Volt a runaway success.

Funny, the Generals failed in Vietnam, then failed in Iraq and are now failing in Afghanistan, but are still admired by the average guy on the street.

At no time did the generals fail in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. We haven't lost a battle since Korea, but we lose wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan), because in a republic like ours, politicians control the military.

The volt graphic needs updating to include the aux cooling sys trlr to keep the batteries from overheating and exploding, Doug.

BTW, I think Allen put up the same link earlier, but it cannot be repeated too many times. Volt = $$$Kludge. The new paradigm: take my money to enable someone else to buy something that doesn't work, e.g., Volt [or it would already be in production without subsidy], then call it progress. Subsidize the removal of affordable and reliable used vehicles from the market place thereby driving up my cost to buy one of them, again taking my money to give to someone else to buy themself a new car, then call it leadership.

”It's a hard, hard row to hoe but, godammit, millions have to do it every miserable work day to keep the rest of you from injuring yourselves…”

The problem defined.

Typical thinking of the left leaning statist bureaucrat.

I approached the subject in an offhand manner on the previous post because I had to leave to get a haircut. However, both your posts indicate the problem we face in this country. It is the idea that we need the government to take care of us in all aspects of our life.

The size of the federal government has more than doubled in the last ten years. Are we better off? There are an awful lot of people that would argue we are worse off. The liberal response? We would have been worse off if we hadn’t done it (a proposition that is impossible to prove). Some would argue that the liberal argument is questionable; others would argue that it is pure bullshit.

The prime function of a bureaucracy is to continue its existence. The second major goal is to expand and grow in order to assure the prime function. Even a bureaucracy of one has a constituency and the government is in the business of supporting constituencies. That’s why we don’t see sunset laws anymore. Bureaucracies continue to grow even after they no longer are needed to accomplish their initial purpose, and the overall government continues to grow just like Topsy.

And who are the biggest supporters of the bureaucracies? The bureaucrats. And this is not strictly because of self-serving self-interest. In many cases, they are merely clueless when it comes to budgetary concerns. Why should they be? How often have we heard of someone in government being fired because they didn’t meet a budget? They get paid for doing a job. The fact that the job may be obsolete, redundant, and/or could be done cheaper by the private sector doesn’t factor into their consideration. They may be sheltered from the ups and downs of the business cycle, but they still consider their jobs essential. They are after all public servants.

"The size of the federal government has more than doubled in the last ten years. Are we better off? "---Only a true blue believer in Socialism could believe that kind of doubling rate, or that of medicine since the govt got involved in much of it, is sustainable.

"I approached the subject in an offhand manner on the previous post because I had to leave to get a haircut. However, both your posts indicate the problem we face in this country. It is the idea that we need the government to take care of us in all aspects of our life."

Oh, my God. What if we really do?

What if government, along with all that is the private sector, is really necessary to messily maintain this marvel of a nation?

Downsizing government, according to liberals, would mean keeping all of the existing government departments but minimizing their strength. I think conservatives would agree that this is a recipe for failure.

Downsizing government, according to conservatives, would mean minmizing the number of government departments but keeping them at maximum strength. I think liberals would agree that this is a recipe for failure, albeit a failure for liberals to keep their sinecures.

"And, which of those formerly ass-bound numbers would you care to dispute, Q, ol' son?"

It's not only your numbers I'd argue with it's your whole premise.

When I said the government doubled I meant I believe it doubled after inflation so I think you're wrong in subtracting for inflation.

Second, you concentrate on military spending which is 20% of the outlays. What about things like the expansion of Medicare benefits for the drug benefit or the quarter million feds Obama has added to the rolls in the name of stimulus. Do you think those jobs are just going to disappear at some point.

On the military, you fluff off the costs like it's a mere inconvenience or a temporary aberration. You forget the war in Iraq was going to pay for itself, at most it would cost us a few billion. Who was it Cheney or Rummy that told us we should be out of there in six month. You seem to be saying the military spending is a temporary aberration. However, this is no mere temporary disturbance in the force young Skywalker. By the time we actually do get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, that expense will be replaced by the costs of the new healthcare expansion. Besides, most conservatives would argue that if you choose to go to war, you figure out a way to pay for it.

On TARP and the stimulus, the same thing applies. Philosophically I’m against both although I’m willing to admit I’m no expert and the people who say we would have met disaster without them could be and probably are right. Of course, I would also argue that a good portion of the stimulus funds were probably wasted. All that aside, these programs point out the trouble with government. Did you know that the way the TARP legislation was written if say they spent the entire thing on troubled assets and then at a later date sold those troubled assets for what they paid or more, they would still have the authority to go out and spend another $700 billion?

Bottom's discussion of his dream is considered by Ann Thompson to have emulated two passages from Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess.[1]

Critics have commented on the profound religious implications of Bottom’s speech on his awakening without the ass’s head in act 4 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

"[. . .] The eye ofman hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive,nor his heart to report, what my dream was. Iwill get Peter Quince to write a ballad of thisdream: it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, becauseit hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter endof a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it themore gracious, I shall sing it at her death." (4.1.209–216)

This speech seems to be a comically jumbled evocation of a passage from the New Testament’s 1 Corinthians 2.9–10:

"The things whicheye hathe not sene, nether eare hath heard,nether came into man's heart, are, whichGod hathe prepared for them that love him.But God hathe reveiled them unto us byhis Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth allthings, yea, the deepe things of God."

Steven Doloff also suggests that Bottom's humorous and foolish performance at the end of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" mimics a passage from the previous chapter of Corinthians:

"For seing the worlde by wisdome knewenot God in the wisdome of God, it pleasedGod by the foolishnes of preachingto save them that believe:Seing also that the Jewes require a signe,and the Grecians seke after wisdome.But we preache Christ crucified : untothe Jewes, even a stombling blocke, & untothe Grecians, foolishnes:But unto them which are called, botheof the Jewes & Grecias we preache Christ,the power of GOD, and the wisdome of God.For the foolishnes of God is wiser the men [. . .]." (1 Corinthians 1.21–25)

This passage's description of the skeptical reception Christ was given by his Greek audience appears to be alluded to in Bottom's performance. Just as Christ's preaching is regarded as "foolishnes," Bottom's audience perceives his acting (as well as the entirety of the play he is a part of) as completely without value, except for the humor they can find in the actors' hopelessly flawed rendering of their subject matter. Doloff writes that this allusion is especially likely because, in both texts, the skeptical audience of the "foolish" material is composed of Greeks, as the spectators of Bottom et al. are Theseus, the duke of Athens, and his court. [2]

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.